Digicloud Africa partner Synthesis is taking the lead in terms of local Google Gemini Enterprise implementations, becoming the first of its partners to deploy the latest Google Cloud AI-powered agentic platform in the whole of Africa, and implementing it for a second customer in the space of a month, according to the company.
Gemini Enterprise, launched in October last year, has already seen several major upgrades, with Gemini 3.1 Pro introduced last month. This update was integrated into Gemini Enterprise to handle complex, enterprise-grade reasoning tasks.
Nick Treurnicht, Google Certified Professional Workspace Administrator and Senior Customer Engineer at Digicloud Africa, says: “Across the board from our partners, we are seeing tremendous volumes of inquiries. There are a lot of discussions about POCs, but Synthesis has been one of the partners to actually put this in production for customers who are practically using it and not just trialling it or POCing it.”
Secure, compliant integration
Louis-Philip Shahim, Google Cloud Practice Lead at Synthesis, says two clients in the financial sector, Lombard and Credeq, have integrated Gemini Enterprise into high-impact use cases such as cross-system search, productivity enhancements, automated insights and the augmentation of new and existing applications.
Shahim notes that Google Cloud and Gemini Enterprise offer a secure, compliant foundation to analytics and AI for even highly regulated industries like banking and insurance. “It can connect securely to anything within the Google ecosystem – Google Drive, Mail, Sites, Calendars and chat – and third-party systems, and with a unified and centralised data platform in Google Cloud, possibilities are further enhanced.
“Chief security officers may have concerns about Gemini access to all of your SharePoint data or everybody's mailboxes, but Google is actually permission aware. So when you set up these integration points, if you don't have access to specific files or folders on SharePoint already, you're not going to automatically gain access to that. It uses your identity and you can only access what you already have permission to access,” he explains.
Changing the way people work
Shahim says: “Gemini Enterprise has been described as a unified front door for AI in the workplace, and this is what clients are finding. For companies in the finance and insurance spaces in particular, there is a lot of legacy technology, old tooling and many different providers, which makes it complicated to optimise the use of data. For example, people may struggle to search through documents in their SharePoint, Outlook mail, Slack and Google Drive. We’ve used Gemini Enterprise to link them all and give people a single source of truth, like a front door to query any documentation that lives within the organisation.”
He adds: “One client’s CTO said this gives teams access to over 30 years of contextual information, ie, knowledge shared over 30 years. It’s changed the way people work.”
Leandre Roux, Cloud Practice Lead at Synthesis, says: “Many organisations aren’t able to make full use of the data within their businesses. They're very data rich, so there's a lot of historical data and they've got all that data sitting there gathering dust. What they get with Gemini Enterprise is the ability to look at all of that information and go down a path of discovery with it quite easily. There's no development required to do this. The value for organisations is being able to take all the information they've gathered over the years and dynamically look at it.”
Shahim adds: “Because we have connected everything, users also find that instead of opening four different applications and trying to go through their workflows, they can now just say: ‘What are my priorities for today? Help me action this.’ That is changing the way people actually work on a day-to-day basis. It's like you have your own personal assistant, your own knowledge base with all these years of context.”
Says Roux: “The tooling that sits on top of Gemini Enterprise gives them much more than the ability to look at some data and do fancy reporting. They are using it every day to simplify their jobs, and it's been very successful for them. They'll even push everybody to turn the Gemini notes on in meetings, because this will be fed into a centralised location where people can then go and search using their Gemini agents to get summaries or whatever's pertinent to them.”
“With Gemini, Google is continually making the AI more advanced and grounded, and improving the model’s environmental efficiency,” Treurnicht concludes.
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